The A arte Invernizzi gallery will open on Wednesday, 14 December 2016 at 6.30 p.m., the exhibition “Close Up. ‘Listening to the Inaudible Sound of the Work’”, curated by Francesca Pola. Consisting only of small-format works, it creates a dazzling array of contemporary styles and visions. The exhibition offers a very different approach to the experience of the work of art, which is far removed from that of monumental installations or large works. Here there is an identification with the artefact, based on a direct, almost tactile interaction with the physical nature of these works. Because of their size, they can indeed be observed and comprehended through close-up perception.
The idea of an exhibition of small-format works has plenty of historic precedents, ranging from Marcel Duchamp’s “Boîte-en-valise” to the Iris Clert’s Parisian “Microsalon”. And there were also exhibitions of travel sculptures and multiplied art by Bruno Munari and Daniel Spoerri. Even so, the focus here is not on the “portable” aspect of works of this size, though this often turns them into the materialisation of an idea that can be transported easily. In this exhibition, what takes pride of place is the intimacy of the relationship that forms between the viewer and the individual work. This is brought about by the need to stop and focus on each item in order to understand its creative mechanisms, giving rise to a sort of empathy between the beholder and the object. One aspect that is by no means secondary in this process of participation is of course the time spent on each work, which expands in inverse proportion to the size of the object itself.
The relationships between the works on display are based on spatial and associative mechanisms, favouring those creative personalities, characterised by their significant reduction, that have always underpinned the gallery’s exhibition programmes. The viewer is taken close up, in a way that is by no means predictable, in which sequence does not mean seriality, nor iteration repetition.

On the occasion of the exhibition a bilingual catalogue will be published, with an introductory essay by Francesca Pola, reproductions of the works on display, and poems by Carlo Invernizzi that draw on this human empathy. The subtitle of the exhibition also takes inspiration from a phrase of his, emphasising the “inaudible sound of the work”, which can only be perceived in this close-up approach of attention.

For his second solo exhibit Green River at Brand New Gallery, Raffi Kalenderian draws on an array of techniques that illuminates his process and expand on his Californian vision.

His attentiveness to image-making draws on qualities of both darkness and the vibrancy of flash photography. He once again portrays a milieu of Los Angeles creatives - fellow painters, poets, actors, artists – emerging from a hypnotic blackness, imbued with an awkward dignity. Even when he departs from portraiture it remains an anchor that grounds his corpus, as does his process, in the psychological. The subjects seem to be waiting for someone or something, with their gazes often lost in the void, absorbed in a narrative that seems to have no limits in either space or time.

In this body of work, space bends, brush marks dissolve images, and darkness is built-up in layers, creating moments where paintings mechanisms are the real subject. Kalenderian’s approach to landscape is activated by an abstraction and freedom that set them apart from the pastoral, existing instead as a reckoning with an environment impacted by crisis.

The shows title is borrowed from a song by seminal Californian rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival:

“You’re gonna find the world is smouldrin’. And if you get lost come on home to Green River.”

Raffi Kalenderian

(b. 1981, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Raffi Kalenderian received a BFA from University of California Los Angeles and spent his residency in St. Barthélemy, French West Indies.

The show features an installation of new works exploring ideas of transformation and energy transference through painting, sculpture and mixed media installation.

In this exhibition, Smith uses her signature materials of fabric, calligraphy and collage, as well as her body as a brush to create a new site-specific wall painting of frenetic script and gestural body prints, which will be in conversation with paintings and hanging sculptures.

Black Swan is a metaphor for a rare event, like the sighting of a previously unknown, once assumed, mythical bird that when seen changes preconceived notions built on the belief of its non-existence.

Through this collection of works Smith continues her “quest for wonder, beauty and the expression of unseen forces” that may lie within the preconceived notions of everyday objects.

Shinique Smith’s work is inspired by the vast nature of “things” that we consume and discard, which resonate on a personal and social scale. The Graffiti of her youth, Japanese calligraphy, and Abstraction are influences from which she extracts “the graceful and spiritual qualities in written word and the everyday.”

Shinique Smith

(b. 1971, Baltimore, MD) lives and works in Brooklyn and Ulster County, NY.

Smith earned her MFA (2003) from Maryland Institute College of Art, where she served on the Board of Trustees (2013-2016) and her MAT (2000) from The Museum School and Tufts University.

Cardi Gallery, Milan is glad to present Mimmo Rotella. Blanks, an exhibition dedicated to a selection of works produced by Mimmo Rotella from the beginning of 1980s.

If with the décollages, realized tearing posters taken directly from the street, the artist had discovered the infinite possibilities of the popular image, with the blanks (also called ‘coperture’) he set out to explore the temporal and linguistic limits of this mode of communication.
The street and the city were once again sources of inspiration for the artist that, wondering around Milan, discovered that the posters were covered up by monochrome pieces of paper when the time of their display on the city walls was over. Fascinated by the hidden message, obliterated by a quite anonymous paper, he started to create the blanks: a procedure that cancel the chaos, the disorder, the superimposition shown with the décollage covering them with a new skin made up of monochrome tissue paper revealing the infinite possibilities of colour, of transparency and of the essential act.

The majority of the blanks were created in the beginning of 1980s by sticking large monochrome – black, white and coloured – sheets of paper onto old and disused advertising hoardings. Right at the beginning of that decade Rotella left Paris and moved for good to Milan. He had a new studio and began to forge new links with the city and its streets. The ‘coperture’ were the starting-point for his subsequent research, marked by for a return to the image through an approach influenced by the graffiti language.
The blanks were shown for the first time in Milan in January 1981. Since then these works have been exhibited on very few occasions. So Cardi Gallery is trying to fill this gap and presenting to the public a little-known but crucial aspect of Mimmo Rotella’s production.

A catalogue, that is the first publication to be devoted entirely to the subject, accompanies the show and we believe it bodes well, and can be an excellent point of departure, for future studies of this series of works. The exhibition Mimmo Rotella, Blanks is part of “Mimmo Rotella 2016” an initiative linked to the tenth anniversary of the passing of Mimmo Rotella. It involves a number of galleries and institutions in Milan, witnessing the relationship between the artist and the city where he worked and lived in his last years.
The initiative is realized in collaboration with Mimmo Rotella Institute, set up in 2012 by Inna and Aghnessa Rotella with the aim of compiling the catalogue raisonné, improving understanding of the figure and the art of Mimmo Rotella and promoting his work at the national and international level. The Mimmo Rotella Institute is directed by Antonella Soldaini with the scientific support of Veronica Locatelli.

With this show Cardi Gallery confirms once again its interest for national and international historical artists.

Mimmo Rotella (Catanzaro, 1918 - Milan, 2006) is an artist renowned internationally for the invention, in 1953, of the technique of décollage. During his long career, he experimented with multiple artistic techniques, broaden his own linguistic and formal horizons: besides the décollage, he realized retro d’affiches, collages, photographic reproduction, artypos, frottages, effaçages, blanks, sovrapitture and sculptures.
Restless and histrionic, in the first years of the 1940s he moved to Rome where he emerged in the environment linked to the new abstract avantgarde. In 1960 he took part in the group of the Nouveaux Réalistes.
After participating in the Venice Biennale in 1964 with a personal room, he decided to move to Paris, where he interwove important relationships with critics and artists. In 1968 he lived for a brief period in the Chelsea Hotel in New York; once back in Europe he started travelling to India and Japan. In 1972 his first autobiography was published Autorotella. Autobiografia di un artista. In 1974 Tommaso Trini edited the first in-depth monographic book on the career of the artist. Back in Milan in 1980, he started to create the blanks or ‘coperture’. In 1984 he went back to figurative with the series of works on acrylic on canvas and, in 1986, of the sovrapitture, In the first years of the 1990s he made some sculptures and went back to décollage that began to reach monumental dimensions. In the 1990s and 2000s he received recognitions and national and international awards. In 2000 he established the Fondazione Mimmo Rotella, currently chaired by Rocco Guglielmo and directed by Piero Mascitti; in 2005 he opened his home-museum in Catanzaro, called ‘Casa della Memoria’. Still in full activity, he died on January 8th, 2006 in Milan.

With the emblematic title of “Araki Amore” the Galleria Carla Sozzani presents an exhibition of Nobuyoshi Araki one of the most renowned and perhaps controversial Japanese photographers. A selection of works curated by Filippo Maggia,
mostly unpublished and produced in the last two years.
Nobuyoshi Araki is a generous artist, a tireless explorer of human passions and a fine portrait maker. He is always able to deeply relate with his subjects. In this exhibition the classic themes of his photographic research - nudes, portraits, floral arrangements, the orderly yet chaotic metropolitan city - are all read today and processed with the recovery of negatives from the past decades.
The female figure appears here to be as a less visible, almost evoked: in the dancing figures of the Kaori dancers and in the use of dolls and other puppets that have always populated the dreams of the Tokyo photographer, as if they were souvenirs or memories, simple notes left on the sentimental diary of a life that has been spent to celebrate the beauty and the time transience of things that are destined to fade.
Araki is never tired of exploring the mystery of the female universe, today as even more than fifteen years ago, when in Tokyo he said to Filippo Maggia: “I'll tell you something that might even seem extreme and absurd: I do not know anything about the nature of women. Through the lens I try to extract the nature of things and, in the case of women, of what they are like, in their daily lives or in their sexuality. But they are all different from each other, and that’s why I keep on taking pictures.”
The themes of eros and death are a constant in his work: "After reincarnation in my new life, photography will still be the first word that I utter. It’s been a 60-year contract, near enough. - Photography is love and death – that’ll be my epitaph”.
Araki belongs to a generation of artists who emerged in the 1960s whilst Japan was experiencing radical economic growth and urbanisation as a result of post-war recovery. The societal transformations and cultural shifts influenced him. He likewise often reflects Japanese heritage, with the women wearing traditional dress and the contemporary fears. Likewise, many of his images feature mythical monsters, taken from the Kaiju (science fiction movies like Godzilla) where monsters attack Japanese cities.
In the exhibition at the Galleria Carla Sozzani there are three new compositions of more than 100 polaroid, in color and in black & white, that have been selected and put together by Araki as unique works, and a video documentary that presents, for the first time in Italy, Nobuyoshi Araki to work with the dancer Kaori in a naked portrait session, taken last year in July in Tokyo.
Nobuyoshi Araki is born on the 25 May 1940 in Tokyo. Graduated in photography and film at Chiba University’s Department of Photography, Painting and Engineering with a focus on the study of film and photography. He worked for a decade, until 1972, at the Advertising Agency Dentsu, made his first solo exhibition in 1965 in Shinijuku Station Building and won two main photographic awards. In 1971 he married Yoko Aoki, a central figure in his private life and in his artistic career. In the 80’s he was documenting hard pubs in Tokyo and published the volume “Tokyo Lucky Hole”. In 1990, the year of the death of his partner, Araki published the series “Sentimental Journey / Winter Journey”, on his personal relationship with her, her death and funeral. Since then a number of countless publications and exhibitions followed in galleries and museums around the world including: the Musée National des Arts Asiatiques Guimet, Paris (2016); Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam (2014); The Barbican Art Gallery, London (2005); Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2003); Museo Pecci, Prato (2002); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent (2000); Wiener Secession, Vienna (1997); Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris (1995).

Federico Bianchi Contemporary Art is pleased to present Tony Just 3th solo show at the gallery, to be opened 19 November, 2016, at 6.00 p.m. - via Imbonati 15, Milano.

The color in all these paintings is pthalo blue. It is a synthetic blue originally produced by a chemist. It has an iridescence to it which appears to cause the blue to change colors. The shape which you see repeated throughout this work is from one of the books that I make. Each book is begun by pouring a colored liquid over an open book standing on its spine. The liquid runs down the pages creating a Rorschach image which is not always symmetrical. After this has dried I go back and paint the spaces left blank between the original drips. Once they are painted one can see these new shapes which were created with the help of chance, more clearly. The shape in these paintings appealed to me because of its bulbous form. After the first one, I wanted to make more but lighten the color on each succeeding canvas. This was done by gradually adding white to the original color. I could then watch the color slowly get lighter. The shape has changed slightly through each painting. I believe this helps to slow down how one sees the paintings. The shape was produced quickly, starting in the center and working out with both palms and fingers from my hands. There is a second coat of paint over the first one to give it more depth and texture.
This last month of October, I've been watching one of my favorite trees from my apartment window here in Berlin. I've watched it's leaves slowly turn color from late summer green to autumn yellow. An annual event which I try to pay attention to and which brings me great peace of mind. Can I do this with a painting?
(Tony Just)

“My thoughts are wounds in my brain.
My brain is a wound. I want to be a machine.
Arms to grasp legs to walk no pain no thoughts.”
Heiner Müller

Galleria Fumagalli presents the video of the performance, that took place on December 28, 2016 at Il Piccolo Teatro d'Europa (Milan): “Jannis Kounnellis, Theodoros Terzopoulos. Die Hamletmaschine by Heiner Müller”, curated by Annamaria Maggi and Alexandra Papadopulos.

For the twentieth anniversary of the death of Heiner Müller, the artist Jannis Kounellis and the director Theodoros Terzopoulos, both friends and collaborators of the German playwright and poet, worked together on a theater project to pay homage to the figure and work of what was defined, in the nineties, ”the greatest living playwright“. Müller was one of the most significant authors of the postwar German theater and has always had a solid relationship with visual arts. Premiered last December at Il Piccolo Teatro d’Europa the project by Kounellis and Terzopoulos consists of an installation (stage and audience), created by Kounellis, and a performance from Die Hamletmaschine written in 1977 by Heiner Müller, directed by Terzopoulos.

Die Hamletmaschine (Hamletmaschine) is a postmodern drama loosely based on the Hamlet of William Shakespeare. Peculiar of the work is the friction of the poetic word with the story, divided into five sequences of monologues in which the protagonist leaves his theatrical role to reflect on his being an actor. The interpreter of Hamlet finds himself morbidly tied to his character, struggling with his passions and his own ghosts. His is a rambling soliloquy in which are laid bare, on one hand, the abandon of any utopian impulse and, secondly, the paradoxes of the modern intellectual, torn between the inability to change the state of things and the will to turn into a machine at the service of the power. The result is a fragmented narration, with no harmony, as if the inner world of the Hamlet’s interpreter wanted to explode in the accidentally intrusion of shreds of sentences and barely audible sounds.

The relationship of Jannis Kounellis with the theater began in 1968 with the coal sacks’ scene for the theater of Quartucci, followed by the ”barking dogs“ for the Mauser by Heiner Müller in Berlin in 1991, the curtain of knives and the inverted cross for the Cimarron with music by Hanz Werner Heinze in Montepulciano in 2000, the three large trains inside a huge hangar designed for the Opera Beuys in Dusseldorf in 1998, the curtain of stones tied to ropes for the greek theater in Elefsina 2010 and the monumental “gothic” curtain of metal with benches on three levels for the Wagner Loengrin in Amsterdam in 2014. For each of these works the artist worked on a ”curtain“, a ”frontal view“ without perspective, ”just like in all modern painting”, using a language of real things: sacks of charcoal, fire, earth, wool, jute bags, plants, animals, - claiming to the artistic material its own truth and revelation power with poetic, literary and symbolic references. A real drama to be understood in terms of scenic writing, able to transform the space into a “theatrical and humanistic cavity”, as the artist says, because “it is the man the real point of view of the theater, its centrality, which unlike the painting has a development and a great immediacy.“

On the occasion of the second exhibition after the opening of the exhibition spaces in Milano, Galleria Fumagalli presents part of the installation conceived by Jannis Kounellis for Il Piccolo Teatro d'Europa and the video projection of the performance. Kounellis has thought of an Hamlet ”with the back to the ruins of Europe" for an installation at the same time personal and social, against corruption and power. For this new performance Terzopoulos has selected excerpts from Die Hamletmaschine taking shape in the feminine voice of the actress Sofia Hill, the live electronic music of Panagiotis Velianitis and the male voice of the director.

Giò Marconi is pleased to present Frankfurt-based artist Tobias Rehberger (b.1966 in Esslingen, Germany) in his fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. One of the most important German artists of his generation, Rehberger regularly straddles the lines between the realms of painting, sculpture, design, architecture and conceptual art. His sculptures, environments and installations principally revolve around the concept of transformation and are always exploring the boundaries between the functional and the aesthetic.

At Giò Marconi the artist surprises with the choice of works: on display inside the gallery are more than 30 differently sized framed works on paper. The drawings date from diverse periods and therewith function as a mini retrospective on paper. The exhibited works include both watercolours, prints, pencil and crayon drawings. Some works are studies for bigger projects and environmental installations for which the artist is best known and for which in 2009 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the 53rd International Venice Biennial. Others are completed pieces and autonomous works. Even if his work on paper is initially difficult to align with his sculptural work, it fits seamlessly into an oeuvre in which there are no hierarchies.

There is a touch of humour in Rehberger naming his exhibition Tous pour les femmes - an affirmation of the eternal feminine.
The drawings are to some extent overly ironic and sometimes on the verge of political correctness: “Prejudices against white males (15)” shows a cooked chicken on a plate with bent, spread legs and folded arms, very much resembles a tanned headless reposing woman.
Other drawings openly play with political, racial and sexual stereotypes and prejudices: the girl with the protruding bottom upon which she balances sweets and a glass of milk; the man checking the contents of another man’s pants; the all naked girl band which epitomizes every man’s wet dream.
“Mehr Russen, Kongolesen, Syrer, Pariser und Amerikaner, die schon mal besser aussahen” is a series of watercolours depicting people in traditional folk costumes from all over Europe. As oftentimes with Rehberger, he puns with his titles and witty use of language. His very comic approach through language can also be seen in “Sam in Car” that is a take on a famous Daihatsu ad. The watercolour depicts a mini van jam-packed with various women and an ironic text which reads “Picks up six times more women than a Lamborghini”. No further explanation needed.

Besides the large number of watercolours on display, Rehberger has also produced two new garish neon signs. What they are advertising offers conflicting information. A flashing “Tous pour les femmes” sign with a raised fist, a symbol reminiscent of the 70s feminist movement, welcomes the visitor upon entering the gallery’s courtyard. The bright neon alternates between “Tous pour les femmes” and “RES-TO”, the Italian word for remnants (or small change), which seems to imply that all there is for women are the leftovers. A yellow arrow signposts the way into the gallery space.
Inside, in the gallery’s anteroom, the visitor is greeted by yet another neon sign: a flickering „What else?“ morphs into “S-WE-AT” and dismisses the visitor into the exhibition and Rehberger’s world on paper.
Is the bottom line of Tobias Rehberger’s fourth show “Tous pour les femmes” an affirmative “What else”?

A professor since 2001 at Frankfurt’s Städelschule, the school he attended from 1987 to 1993 and one of Europe’s most prestigious art schools, Rehberger took part in his first exhibition in 1992. Since then, he has had solo exhibitions at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2014); MACRO Museum, Rome (2014); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2008); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2007); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2005); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2004); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2002).
His works have been showcased at the Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2012); Manifesta 1, Rotterdam (1996) and 2, Luxembourg (1998); Venice Biennial (1997, 2003 and 2009). In 2009, he was awarded the Golden Lion for best artist for the design of his café Was Du liebst, bringt dich auch zum Weinen (The things you love also make you cry) at the Palazzo delle Esposizione.
Other awards include the Otto-Dix-Preis (2001) and the Hans-Thoma- Preis in 2009.

The Laura Bulian Gallery is pleased to announce the forthcoming exhibition The Degrees of Freedom by Ugo La Pietra, the artist's first solo exhibition at the gallery as its inaugural show of the new season in Milan. The exhibition brings together a series of works the artist created during the 70s – one of La Pietra's most innovative and productive decades – which are now attracting renewed interest both among the public at large and in the art world.

The title The Degrees of Freedom harkens back to one of Ugo La Pietra's most successful slogans, referred to some of the cycles of his research between 1969 and 1976 which were decidedly conceptual in character. Those were the years of radical architecture and the constellation of the Global Tools group, but rather than defining a period, the expression “degrees of freedom” signifies a radical response to modernist utopia and ultimately to great collective subjects. It is both a working method and a philosophy in the true sense: replacing the exclusive character of a project with molecular and multiple expressive forces, likewise replacing transformation processes with gradual concatenations or forms of modulation. It means influencing the way both society and the urban environment have been conceived in the modern era; it also means compromise for the very categories of art.

Cycles of work, for the most part photographs and texts, such as Itinerari preferenziali / Preferred itineraries (1969), Recupero e reinvenzione / Recovery and Reinvention (1969/76) or Ad ognuno la propria realtà / To each one his own reality (1972/74) and Viaggio sul Reno / A trip on the river Rhine (1974) – all part of the current exhibition – which refuse abstraction and reclaim territory that had earlier been marginalized in favour of anonymous creativity and hitherto unexplored spaces. In the same way elementary devices as in Il Commutatore / The commutator (1970) or the bench in Decodificazione dell’ambiente / Decoding the environment (1975) – also part of this exhibition – suspend that which has already been established, identified or habitual so as to promote an event. The same applies to the extraordinary artwork/investigation entitled Il desiderio dell’oggetto / The desire of the object (1973) a sort of ongoing institutional critique and disciplinary criticism.

When, during the 70s, Ugo La Pietra became involved in architecture and the urban environment with a multiplicity of (eclectic and heterogeneous) semiotic proposals, his research was not geared towards expressive or stylistic freedom (as has often been postulated) but towards perceptive necessity: it was a break with monolingualism (not only in the disciplinary sense) aimed at connecting to topographical and social transformation processes which could no longer find their roots in the unequivocal relationship between observation devices and observed phenomena.

Indeed, La Pietra is a builder of models, a toolmaker, and during the 70s he found himself working on the edge of what has come to be defined as the information society – with its ‘networked’ morphology and ‘control’ engaged as a power wielding mechanism. If there is no one model that predominates, if it is true that the artist “has distanced himself from the single line of research aimed at a unique artistic solution” (as has been posited), this is because La Pietra's intention is to assert multiple relations, engage with a range of ramifications, acknowledging the coexistence of possibilities waiting to be explored.

On this proposal, which is difficult both to define and to categorise, the exhibition presents a plurality of expressive elements encompassing collage, photo-montage, video, artist's books and plastic structures without ever assuming to exhaust Ugo La Pietra's infinite aesthetic proliferation.

MARS is proud to present Yari Miele’s solo show, Blue Night Marble. The site-specific work set in the space of MARS uses polychrome marbles which were discarded after their industrial use in laser inlays. The artist reconstructs the marble textures through a skillful use of colors, following the natural pattern of veins, inclusions and cavities.
Blue Night Marble paraphrases the name of a famous satellite photograph of the Earth taken in 1972. Its nocturnal interpretation leaves space to the usual practice of the artist of using fluorescent paints livened up by Wood's lamps. Thus nocturnal visions of bright heavens are generated, appearing from the darkness. Daylight instead highlights the pictorial trace on the slabs fragments which lie, sedimented, in an uneven and sharp ravines landscape, reshaping the space and turning it into orographies made sculptural by chance.

September 20 —December 17, 2016
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Massimo De Carlo inaugurates its 2016-2017 season in Milan with an exhibition in two parts by the Swiss artist Urs Fischer.

Urs Fischer is the first artist to exhibit in Massimo De Carlo’s two spaces: at the recently inaugurated space at Palazzo Belgioioso and in the gallery’s headquarters on Via Ventura.

Shifting between the familiar and the unknown, Urs Fischer’s world is populated by sculptures, installations, paintings, and drawings that construct an infinite anthology of mutations. With wit and an often-dark sense of humour, Fischer’s work provokes and evokes, playing with archetypes through the radical transformation of materials.

In the converted warehouse venue of Via Ventura Urs Fischer has created a microcosm of small- scale hand-painted and raw bronze sculptures. The twenty-six sculptures are like poetic vignettes that depict unusual interactions: they are delicate yet at the same time imposing, comical and shadowy as if they were hiding an allegorical secret. The gallery is transformed into a dazing miniature dreamlike tableau that captures moments in time: here these humorous reveries take the form of a satirical play on ordinariness. A barefoot man crawling into a crushed soda can, a nude lady reclining on a chaise longue next to a snail, a crying horse, a rat playing a piano: all these sculptures build a kaleidoscopic anthology of Urs Fischer’s imaginary, drawn from fragments of his career and aesthetics.

In the newly opened exhibition space in Piazza Belgioioso are two new sculptures: using photography, painting, and glass-making Urs Fischer has created two pairs of oversized, highly realistic eyeballs. These almost cartoonish sculptures reflect the viewer and the space at the same time, enhancing the uncomfortable feeling of being followed by a disturbing gaze.

Battito di Ciglia is a light-hearted investigation of scale, perception and observation that challenges the spatiality of the gallery and the contemplation of the viewer by playing with key themes of Urs Fischer’s practice: irrationality and darkness, playfulness and research, daydream and sombreness.

We are delighted to announce an exhibition by Alex Katz, after his exhibitions this year at Guggenheim in Bilbao and Serpentine Gallery in London.

We will present the more intimate side of the great painterʼs work: his small paintings, or “oil scketches”, and drawings.

As opposed to their large-scale counterparts, the small paintings are made directly in front of the live model or en plein air, their brush strokes are more gestural and impulsive. These are not only preparatory studies showing a monumental plan at its birth, but also autonomous works revealing the initial and spontaneous passion of the artist for his subject. Katz’s ability in rendering the fragile unity of a moment, with a few brush strokes, reveals much of the person portrayed and of the artist’s personal reflections, voluntarily abandoned in the large portraits on canvas which show a more stylized and essential vision.This characteristic is enhanced by the small size which draws the viewer to approach closely and enter the space of the painting, thereby establishing a more intimate physical and mental relationship with the work.
Also the drawings offer insight into the artist's process as often the original idea for a painting is illustrated here in its nascent state. Katz draws quickly in charcoal and pencil searching for the right angle.
Alex Katz was born in New York in 1927 as the son of Russian – Jewish immigrants and studied painting at the Cooper Union School of Art from 1946 to 1949. Since the 1960s he has developed a highly innovative realist style unlike any of his contemporaries. Having appeared on the American artistic scene at the end of the ʻ50s, the years of Abstract Expressionism, and being a contemporary of Pop Art and the subsequent artistic movements, Katz surprisingly managed to reconcile the abstract movement with realism in US post war art, in a style that he himself defines as “totally American”. His final images are essential, luminous, direct and sharp, showing very intense colour planes, rendered in a particular bidimensional perspective, free of any sentimental connotation and yet able to communicate a profound emotional involvement.

The work of Alex Katz is widely represented at museum in the USA, including MoMA, the Metropolitan and the Whitney in New York, as well as in European Museums, like Tate Modern in London, the MMK in Frankfurt, the Albertina in Vienna and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.